Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Monday April 22, 2013 @08:03PM
from the bogus-patents-for-all dept.

New submitter Rideak writes with this excerpt from CNet about an ITC ruling against Motorola in their case against Apple for violating a few of their proximity sensor patents: "The U.S. International Trade Commission today ended Motorola's case against Apple, which accused the iPhone and Mac maker of patent infringement. In a ruling (PDF), the ITC said that Apple was not violating Motorola's U.S. patent covering proximity sensors, which the commission called 'obvious.' It was the last of six patents Motorola aimed at Apple as part of an October 2010 complaint."

He never said that rounded corners were distinctive. He said that they were a part of a distinctive design, which gets at a fundamental principle of design patents that you seem to not understand. Design patents work by specifying a number of claims for a particular design, which are taken as a whole when determining if infringement occurred. There is no design patent just for rounded corners. Don't believe me? Prove me wrong. What you'll find is that rounded corners are always just one claim among many in the design patents in which they're mentioned, and so they are never considered in a vacuum when determining whether a product infringes on the design patent.

To put it a bit differently, Coca-Cola has a design patent covering their iconic bottle shape, yet no one is suggesting that Coca-Cola has a patent on all curved bottles just because their design patent includes curves as one of its claims. To infringe, you'd have to include not just curves in your bottle design, but curves that matched the other claims and diagrams presented in their design patent before you'd be infringing on their patent.

Similarly, Apple's infamous iPhone patent that included rounded corners as one of its claims also included a number of other claims as well (I believe it also included a flat glass front, a thin aluminum bezel, a round button near the bottom, specified that the rounded corners had to be uniform in shape, and had a few more items as well). For infringement to take place, ALL of those claims would be considered together, rather than just the uniform rounded corners claim.